Brightmoor was Detroit's most abandoned neighborhood. By the 2020s, entire blocks had returned to prairie — houses demolished or collapsed, streets cracking under wild vegetation, the urban grid dissolving into something that looked like nature reclaiming a mistake. By the 2040s, when the rest of Detroit was being carved into corporate sovereign territories, Brightmoor had already been given up on so thoroughly that even the corponations couldn't imagine a use for it. The land was contaminated. The infrastructure was gone. The few hundred remaining residents were classified as 'place-attached excluded' — a bureaucratic designation meaning 'too poor and too stubborn to relocate.'

What nobody anticipated was that abandoned urban land in a region experiencing climate-driven agricultural collapse would become the most valuable untapped resource in the GLMZ. Verdant Systems — the agricultural technology corponation — saw it first. In 2162, Verdant began acquiring Brightmoor parcels for pennies, remediating the soil using proprietary bio-extraction techniques, and converting the former residential blocks into the largest urban agricultural zone in North America. The Brightmoor Reclamation now covers 3,200 acres of vertical hydroponic towers, soil-remediation test plots, and experimental growing operations that produce 8% of the Detroit metro's fresh food supply. The neighborhood that was too broken to save became the farm that feeds the city.

The remaining residents — approximately 3,000 of them, descendants of the place-attached excluded and newer arrivals who found affordable land adjacent to the agricultural zone — occupy a strip along the Reclamation's eastern edge. Their relationship with Verdant Systems is complicated. Verdant provides employment (1,200 jobs in agricultural operations), infrastructure support (the power grid extension that reaches the residential strip was Verdant-funded), and a purpose that the neighborhood hasn't had in living memory. Verdant also owns the land, controls the water supply, determines what gets grown and what gets distributed, and holds a sovereign agricultural charter that exempts the entire Reclamation from municipal zoning, environmental review, and labor standards. The residents work in the towers. The residents eat what the towers produce. The residents do not own the towers. The feudal parallel is obvious to everyone except Verdant's PR department.